The Ultimate Werewolf by Byron Preiss (ed) Page B

she said, misunderstanding. "I'll read it to you if you want." Leaning across the counter, she opened the note—flat white rectangle, short dashing slant of letters.
    He was out the door before she had finished the first sentence entire; he knew where it came from by the scent. Pity and kindness no small disguise but no match in the end for his wariness, developed by necessity, more honed perhaps even than his sense of smell, and underneath it all he smelled the cage. Again. It always started out this way, started nice, warm like a blanket with the soul of a net. For your own good, they would say, she would say, with her red shoes and her wide, pained smile. You're a brilliant man. Hold still.
    That night he lay small and frightened, all his clothing stretched over him like a blind of rags, praying now for the change to come, take hold and stay forever, remove him from contention with this end of the world which he could never hope to navigate without disaster and place him, like a jewel in prongs of waiting silver, in that other, colder, simple place where everything was two things: hot or dead.
    In the morning, crosslegged and weary, eating one by sumptuous one the cocktail peanuts, he made decisions. First and most stringent, he must give up the co-op grocery, which meant his shopping would now be confined solely to dumpsters. Very well, he was prepared to make sacrifices. If by some terrible miscarriage of luck she found his basement home—and now, this moment, how good it looked, milk crates and camping light, boombox and bed, how sorrowful and dear—then he must find another nest, this one deeper, less visible to light and the curiosity of strangers who mean so ruinously well.
    But. Would the missing words come looking, here and leave if he was not? That was insupportable; the last unbearable thing; he shook the thought away with the small frantic motions of a man putting out a fire inside his own head. Surely they were more resilient than that. Surely they could find him wherever he went, if they came looking. But they would never come looking to a hospital, he was sure at least of that.
    So. Made almost light with resolution, the acceptance of a plan of action, he curled back on the bed to seek the sleep denied by last night's worry, found it at once and at length and lay in the gray luxury of its trench, dreaming of a time beyond angel time when thoughts were not words and words were not pain, ache perpetual in their terrible insubstantiality where once they had been so close and concrete, a time when no one cared to find him or even knew that he was; even himself.
    When he woke it was to a fragile restoration, body sleep-rich and possessed of a well-being so rare and giddy it deserved, he thought, celebration. Slotting the batteries in the boom box, turning it on, and up, loud so the small room reverberated, pushy music and his own flat- footed dance, slapping a hand against the outer wall in time to the beat's demands, louder still and in the smiling second's worth of silence between song and patter, a different noise.
    Broken sounds. A man's voice, brusque, walking back and forth, the scrabble of kicked plastic. "Hey!" and in that echo rabbit-heart, he shut off the boom box before realizing that was the surest signal of all. "Hey," again, more sure this time; and he bent, breathless, hinge- spined to grab everything at once, realizing he could not both run and carry, wondering in a weakening flash of greater terror if there was time, or room, to run at all. The shadow of the net and he dancing, blind and stupid, in its fall, no wonder he had lost his words, he did not deserve to have words.
    "Hey, anybody down there?" Heavy-set, bright flashlight, blue uniform: it was the uniform, finally, that sent him bursting empty-armed up the stairs, madder than a wardful of patients, long springing limbs like desperation as he swung past the utility worker—not a policeman after all—and out into the street. Running and